The street is full of pedestrians hunched over their phones, bumping awkwardly into other morning commuters. As they stumble through crowded streets these mobile users are blissfully unaware of the impending dangers.
Using a hand-held mobile device while walking is having a significant influence on pedestrian safety.
As our lives get busier and apps get richer and more engaging, distraction injuries will rise. We are bombarded by information and surrounded by playgrounds of choice. Becoming distracted has never been easier. Our savior to the perils of distracted walking lies with a new breed of applications and devices built with our well-being in mind, to makeus more aware of our surroundings by alerting us of unsafe situations such as oncoming traffic.
Welcome to Safety-Conscious App Design.
There is a new generation of apps that have launched with the right intentions – to help you keep one eye on your surroundings, whilst you use your mobile device. Type n’ Walk is one of many, which uses the rear camera to give you a forward view of the world so that you can text safely. Combined with your peripheral vision you will have enough visual information to walk the streets safely. Well, that’s their claim.
Whether apps like Type n’ Walk are a genuine aid to our well-being or are more likely to alert us to hazardous dog doo than an approaching vehicle will be debated. But what is important is that apps are starting to care about our safety.
Safety-Conscious App Design occurs both intentionally and by chance. Take Snackr for example. Snackr reads out personalized news headlines in bitesized chunks. Users can listen to Snackr to get their news fix and still scan the environment. There is a growing trend towards apps that read out content, such as Tweetspeaker. But Audio alone is not without its dangers. Many recorded pedestrian-vehicle collisions occurred when headphones were being worn.
As the ‘always-connected’ generation becomes the ‘obsessively-connected’ generation it’s unlikely that we’ll put the mobile down quite yet. New applications need to consider this. Safety features in the occasional app may just become default functionality in all apps. Apps will be developed with an in-built ‘walking’ mode. Technology will also become more sophisticated, and in the future our devices will be able to detect vehicles or people approaching (or even fountains!). Mobile devices with embedded sensors will allow applications to understand the environment around them and therefore be used to avoid accidents.
And all of this really does matter. What’s important is that we consider how people use their mobile devices. We need to design for people, for real-world behaviors, and for real-life scenarios. We need to understand the environment and craft experiences for context. And if users’ interactions are putting them into potentially dangerous situations then we have an opportunity to help. We can deliver the tools and features for users to achieve their goals safely.
[originally posted on my Typepad blog but mysteriously all my posts disappeared, so re-posting in this new space]
